So Much For The Afterglow

This is a song about Susan.

That’s how the Everclear album So Much For The Afterglow opens, after about 40 seconds of Brian Wilson soda-jerk harmonies give way to an avalanche of power chords.

This is a song about Susan, the singer, Art Alexakis, continues. This is a song about the girl next door. This is a song about the everyday occurrences that make you feel like letting go. Yes, I think we’ve got a problem.

This is not about Susan, or the girl next door, or any girl. It’s about me, now, dealing with a younger me, a me not always good at realizing when doors were opening, doors that could connect me with people in real ways. This is not a song about Susan.

This is a story about Phil.

I met Phil in college, when I edited my campus literary magazine for two years with my roommate. At that time, I was a wannabe romantic poet with persistent anxiety issues, trying a lot of new things and often failing terribly. As juniors, my roommate and I helped take over The Laurel, one of the longest consecutively published college lit mags in the country, because if we didn’t, we weren’t sure who would. It would probably fold. And in the eyes of the writers we valued and the cool poetry teachers we respected, this was simply unacceptable.

To bump up participation at our weekly meetings, we hung up goofy flyers in dorms and created a Twitter account, still a novel concept in 2010 at our small school. Whatever we did, it worked. Sometimes, 30 people would show up to our meetings to vote on potential contributions to the magazine: poems, short stories, and photos mostly. As a result, The Laurel’s pages filled up with work that was… eclectic: notebook freestyles, teenage poems about awkward sex, weird sonnets, thesaurus-abusing odes to emotion — some of which I, an admitted Lord Byron copycat, wrote myself. (One of them was basically a synopsis of the film Before Sunrise written as if it was 1815. This is not a joke. I actually did this.)

Among the bookish and theater-minded English majors who showed up to our meetings, there was Phil. Phil was a displaced Floridian, about five-foot-eight and paunchy, maybe 28 years old as an undergrad. I can’t picture him in anything except a teal polo, since that’s what he wore when he worked in the dining hall. His Laurel submissions spilled out raw, in dozens of long lines on text-stained pages, with titles like “Escaping Agony’s Company to Discover Eden’s Ecstasy,” “Castle Valley Institute for the Arts Vol. 1,” and “The Exclusivity of Corn.” Some of them were raps, written to be performed, and they didn’t quite sing on the page. Rap bars typically need an audience of ears to which you can sling them. We should’ve had Phil deliver one or two of these pieces at a meeting, but as bad editors, my roommate and I instead let ourselves be perplexed by them and kept Phil at a distance. We wondered how this guy could end up a thousand miles from northwestern Florida at at our tiny snow-drenched Catholic college in the breast pocket of New York State, just to study English and women’s studies. Today, this guy would make a hell of a podcast guest. But I was insecure then, and I only wanted to be surrounded by people who were ostensibly like me. And a balding, soft-spoken dude pushing 30 was not—even with the spit-ready rhymes he had saved as Word documents.

We talked sometimes. Not often, but sometimes. Phil was always down to discuss theology or music or poetry, or really anything vaguely art-related. I didn’t know where he lived or who he lived with (if anyone). I never asked. Maybe he moved up north from Florida thinking he’d find a creative haven at a liberal arts school in the hills but instead found bored 20-year-olds, largely emotionless except when it came to basketball games—the kinds of kids he might’ve hoped he’d left behind. Of course, there were also kids like me, real corny motherfuckers who once recited Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” before I leaned in for a kiss outside the townie bar I conned my way into with a fake ID. Phil would’ve likely found this story hilarious and illuminating, but I never told it to him. What I learned most about Phil I learned through his writing.

I still remember the epigraph to one of his long, angry-young-man poems that he took from the Everclear song called “Why I Don’t Believe in God,” which is track twelve on So Much For The Afterglow. If you opened up the Spring 2012 issue of The Laurel, you’d see the lyrics to it on page 18, atop a piece of writing from Phil that he called “Art 82.” And the epigraph reads:

I ran away, went looking for you
Back to Culver City and the old neighborhood
Need to know if you were really gone
Need to know if you were gone for good
I ran through the projects at night
Hide in the dark from my friends in the light

Phil was not from Culver City, as far as I knew, but it seemed reasonable that he didn’t believe in God, or at least that he was agnostic, or maybe just “exploring” and keeping it loose with labels. We didn’t talk about any of that, even when he’d come up to me in the dining hall in his black apron and wipe down the same spot on the counter just so we could chat for a few minutes. He called me Patrick, which was novel then, as I was a firm “Pat.” (I’ve since made the switch.) The 20-year-old me would think: Who was this dude and why was he trying to talk to me? We could’ve talked about Everclear. And, well, Phil and I did talk about Everclear. Recently.

“Yes, Everclear is dope,” he said to me in a Facebook message in January. And he went on: “Music has a way of saving people.”

Now, Everclear have some tremendous songs, particularly on the So Much For The Afterglow album, though they don’t get talked about with the same reverence as contemporaries like Weezer do, though I’d argue the stylistic similarities are strongly present. Everclear played power-pop, blending what a music writer would probably refer to as “saccharine melodies” with the heaviness of alt-rock. And in my view, it is a crime that So Much For The Afterglow is not held up as a brilliant document of its era. (As an aside, it got an 8.2 on Pitchfork! Granted, this was two years after Pitchfork started, so the standards were a little lower. But still.) It’s an endearing album. Pinkerton is a good album, but it’s also the most problematic album ever, and it still finds its way into top ’90s albums lists. But Afterglow is good, too, and doesn’t include rumination about not being able to sleep with the teenage Japanese fan who wrote you a letter. It goes deep into childhood abandonment issues and what happens after that, and how the effects reverberate like earthquake tremors. I can see how Phil, who is old enough to have drank the album deeply as a teen, would fall hard for it.

Next time you’re paying a 20-buck cover at a ’90s night at some bar in the city, let me know if they play “Father of Mine.” They might not. It might be too much of a downer. But they might! It’s a strong song, and it did OK on the Modern Rock charts. It’s a kind of key into the album’s loose narrative: Art Alexakis, the singer, has an abusive dad who leaves the family early on, and he spends the rest of it exploring how that fucked him up. “Daddy gave me a name, then he walked away,” goes the chorus. And later, on Phil’s favorite song, “Why I Don’t Believe in God,” Art Alexakis mentions learning that his religious mother has had a nervous breakdown over a phone call he gets when he’s in school.

That’s a lot.

I listened to the madness of this album very often this past January, which, if you’ll recall, was one of the most terrifying months in recent memory. A lot of uncertainty and fear and confusion. It seemed oddly appropriate to soundtrack the month with agnostic odes and broken-home narratives.

And so I dug in expecting a lot of rage and loud guitars and, instead, I found quite the opposite. The angst is there, but it’s tucked into chiming acoustic guitars, an easy chord progression in G, and get this — banjos! This is 1997. Banjos are not cool in 1997—although there is a dobro at the end of “One Headlight,” and that’s kinda close. Chumbawamba is cool in 1997, or at least popular. And soon after, Korn and Limp Bizkit would dominate TRL with seven-string guitars and disgusting fuzz tones, and Radiohead had would launch themselves into space on OK Computer. But here was Everclear, in a really earnest song called “Why I Don’t Believe in God,” singing over banjos, and singing Beach Boys harmonies. So I re-read Phil’s piece, the one with the Everclear lyrics at the top of it.

It’s called “Art 82,” and the first line reads: “When I discovered Art Alexakis declared Chapter 11, I knew the voice that supplemented a single-parent household in my adolescence and created an arc in my early adulthood belonged to a man receiving an undeserved tribulation.”

It goes on, and he talks about listening to Everclear while he walked four miles every day to wash dishes at a restaurant he couldn’t afford to eat at, then walking five more to go take GED classes. He was living in a motel, struggling to be accepted as a white rapper in Florida. He calls an Everclear deep cut, “The Swing,” “a sinner’s anthem” and says it made him “want to burn in hell so desperately.” And he brings up the time in 2005 when Everclear singer Art Alexakis had to declare bankruptcy—and how that kind of unjust cosmic punishment to an artist that legitimized his own pain through song, is bullshit. “I’m not certain of hell anymore,” he writes in the last line, “but Art Alexakis declared bankruptcy, and I’m not sure if I could be certain of anything again!”

I’m certain of this much: I should’ve talked to Phil more, because that piece is fucking furious, and it’s good. When I messaged him this year, he told me he’s shooting a film now, and he wants to get it right. He doesn’t want it to look like a “home movie.” And he had to make it, he said, as an escape. He said, “I come from a blue-collar background, and even though I’m proud of my past, the monotony of a 9-to-5 job drove me crazy. It was important to me to develop something that was not only entertaining but something many people would see.”

I thought about appearances. There’s a new-ish Everclear song that’s ostensibly a cover of Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker.” Art Alexakis put it out in 2011, and it’s not super great, it’s kind of interesting because he talks his way through the song in a meta-commentary about why he would sing that song at all. It sounds like Sun Kil Moon. It’s very bizarre. At one point, he sings, “I’m getting tired of people talking about me all the time. Look, I’m a middle-aged man with bleach-blond hair…” Maybe Phil’s food-worker uniform made me think I didn’t have to consider his perspective. I now know how that was a shitty thing to think.

Recently, Phil asked me for a line of dialogue he could use in the movie he’s making—just something quick. A non-sequitur. I fed him an R.E.M. lyric, something from “Harborcoat.” But I should’ve gone with something else. I had a dream not long after that, where Phil came to the city and we saw Everclear play So Much For The Afterglow in its entirety on its 20th-anniversary tour, which is a real thing happening this summer. I might message him soon and ask to swap out that line if it’s not too late. There’s something better, something we could both appreciate. Something like: This is a song about Susan.